Reading
SINA ASHRAFI ' ' ' '''Reading ' ' ' Under such an influence, reading was viewed primarily as a passive, perceptual process. Readers were decoders of symbols printed on a page and they translated these symbols into the corresponding word sounds before they could construct the author’s intended meaning from them (Carrel, Devine, and Eskey 1988) 'Reading within an environmentalist approach ' ' ' Environmentalist ideas shaped not just the theoretical conceptions of what reading was but also research (venezky2002). Yet early reading research focused chiefly on the nature of perception during reading and it became mainly restricted to the relation between stimuli as words and responses as word recognition. ' Given this view of reading, most language programs tackled reading comprehension by focusing on the development of decoding skills, and their major instructional task was to teach readers to discriminate among the visual symbols they encountered on a printed page before they could translate them into word sounds (Pearson and Stephens 1994). The rationale behind this teaching practice was that mastery in decoding skills had to precede the development of reading comprehension. '''Reading within an innate approach ' The early view of reading as a passive, perceptual process was first challenged by the 1960s by Chomsky (1957, 1965) with his theory of language and language development which undermined the behaviorists’ models of language learning that prevailed throughout the 1950s. Goodman (1965) conducted one of the first studies to explain the role of errors or miscues (Goodman 1965) made by readers when reading aloud and his experiment resulted in two important findings. First, learners were able to read a far greater number of words in context than without a context (i.e., word lists). Second, miscues were due to the reader’s intention to make sense from the written text. Goodman’s application of the miscue concept gave a new meaning to oral reading errors, as they became positive aspects in the understanding of the reading process. Later, in a seminal work, Goodman (1967) posited that reading was a psycholinguistic guessing game in which readers guess or predict the text’s meaning on the basis of textual information and activation of background knowledge, then confirm or correct their guesses, and thereby reconstruct the message. In addition, he described the three sources of information (what he called cue systems) that readers make use of to reconstruct text meaning: 1) graph phonic cues (or knowledge of the visual and phonemic features); 2) syntactic cues (or knowledge of syntactic constrains); and 3) semantic cues (or knowledge of the meaning of words). As a result of such a view of reading, learners were taught to become active readers (Reid 1993), that is, to derive meaning from the text by predicting and guessing its meaning by using both their knowledge of language and their background knowledge. The research conducted by Goodman (1965, 1969) and Smith (1971) represented the first step of a transition toward an increasing interest in what goes on in the reader during the reading act. Reading comprehension research began to focus on the reader as a text processor and to move away from the text itself. However, this shift was gradual and, in fact, it was not until the late 1970s that comprehension started to be developed. Reading within an interactionist approach ' In the cognitive psychology field, researchers started to conduct studies on basic processes in reading. They analyzed what happened during the reading act and they incorporated notions of how readers represented text in memory. For instance, the story grammar categories for Stein and Glenn (1979) was: 1) setting, which consists of characters and surroundings;2) Initiating event, which marks a change in the story environment; 3) internal response, which represents the goal; 4) attempt, which is the effort to achieve the goal; 5) consequence, the attainment or non-attainment of the goal, and 6) reaction, which is the outcome of the consequence. '''Teaching reading within a communicative competence framework ' ' ' Hymes (1971) was the first to point out that what was needed was a characterization of not just how language is structured internally but also an explanation of language behavior for given communicative goals. Therefore, he proposed the notion of communicative competence, which included both grammatical competence as well as the rules of language use in social context and the norms of appropriacy. In such a construct, the reading skill plays an essential role in facilitating the acquisition of communicative competence. Therefore, this section aims to show where the reading skill fits into the bigger picture of the proposed communicative competence framework presented by Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume). ' ' ' '''Integrating reading within the communicative competence framework ' ' ' 'Discourse competence ' Discourse competence involves the knowledge of written discourse features such as markers, cohesion and coherence as well as formal schemata (i.e., knowledge of how different discourse types are organized) with reference to the particular communicative goal and context of the written text. In other words, if readers are to be able to interpret a written piece of discourse, they need to understand how discourse features are used and why as well as to relate them to the purposes and contextual features of the particular text. 'Linguistic competence ' Linguistic competence consists of the elements of the linguistic system such as grammar rules and knowledge of vocabulary. Moreover, the ability to read also involves the mastery of the mechanics of the language, such as the alphabet and punctuation (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). 'Pragmatic competence ' Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the illocutionary force of an utterance by being aware of situational and participant variables within which the utterance takes place, as well as politeness issues. Missing when interpreting the communicative intention of a given written text and, therefore, readers must rely on a set of graphic, syntactic and linguistic devices that may help them to interpret the writer’s intended meaning. Kern (2000: 71-73), for example, characterizes the following features: 1) typographical issues such as the choice of capitalization, italic and bold font styles, underlining, the use of exclamation marks or punctuation, and layout of print, among many others; 2) syntactic issues such as cleft constructions to simulate spoken discourse; and 3) lexical issues such as the choice of verbs (i.e., command, ask) or adverbs (i.e., sharply, soothingly)which in a way parallel the tone of voice of oral speech. ' ' 'Intercultural competence ' Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to interpret written texts appropriately within their sociocultural context. Therefore, it involves knowledge of the cultural factors such as knowledge of the sociocultural background of the target language community, knowledge of dialects, and cross-cultural awareness (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995). 'Strategic competence ' Strategic competence has been added to all above-described competencies, since it has been regarded as crucial to the development of reading skills (Anderson 1999). This competence refers to the possession of both communication and learning strategies (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). With reference to reading, the former refers to the ability to use reading strategies to make up for interpretation problems, whereas the latter refers to the ability to use reading strategies to enhance the communicative act between the writer and the reader.